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A few weeks ago I posted about some of the reasons why renting may be a better option for some than buying a home. There’s one big reason though why buying can be better than renting – the bad landlord. Does anyone actually like their landlord? I’ve never had a landlord that I liked. Even just the name, ‘landlord’, predisposes me to not like them. I don’t like that they are the ‘lord of my land’. I don’t live in the middle ages. I don’t plan on mounting a revolution to reclaim my land. I just want to rent an apartment. So why can’t landlords just be property managers and manage their properties with ethics and standards. Is that too much to ask?

Yesterday, I was in my local public library, and I picked up a magazine focused on the local real estate market. One of the articles was written by a couple who had recently sold their house in the city and started renting again. They claim that life has never been better. I devoured the rest of the article with rapt attention. I’ve been renting in the city for years now, ever since I moved here, as the Toronto housing market just seems unattainably expensive. But I’ve always had that nagging itch to buy and to own, to not have to deal with irresponsible landlords and leases. The article, though, reminded me of a lot of the good reasons to rent…

I’m a big fan of a podcast called Radiolab. Hosted by Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich, every week they tackle one big concept – like time, sleep, or identity – and they talk about it for about an hour. Its extremely engaging and never uninteresting. And it was while listening to an episode about zoos, yes that’s right, zoos, that they touched upon a fascinating concept that can be related back to society, lifestyle, money and happiness. You see, at some level, we are all just animals in a cage.